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Update on Finest Hours movie progress

The Finest Hours movie has jumped from an April 2016 release to this October (2015)!

I had an opportunity to meet the costars, Holliday Grainger and Chris Pine, during the filming. I told Chris Bernie would be proud of what he was doing and he replied, “I sure hope so, I’m giving it everything I’ve got.”

Holliday had met Bernie Webber’s daughter, and I told her a little about Miriam, the woman she played.

Having spent a few days on the set during filming, I have to say they make it look easy. The actors, directors, producers and behind-the-scenes people who make it all come together worked very long hours on an exceptionally intense schedule this fall. My hat’s off to them. Can’t wait to see the finished product!

Andy Fitzgerald (right), with Mel Gouthro, visited the movie set in Quincy, where a film reenacting his heroics was shot.

QUINCY — Nearly three dozen crewmen huddle against the cold rail of a massive stricken ship. Lashed by a howling nor’easter, one of them clambers down a 40-foot ladder to a small, pitching, overcrowded rescue boat.

And that’s just on the movie set.

The scene, filmed by Disney Studios in a cavernous building at the former Fore River Shipyard, is a re-creation of what the US Coast Guard calls the greatest rescue by a small boat in its history. As the frantic scene was shot, and then shot again Tuesday, 83-year-old Andy Fitzgerald sat riveted in a director’s chair and recalled the harrowing events of Feb. 18, 1952.

The impossible seemed real again.

Fitzgerald was one of four Coast Guardsmen who left Chatham in a 36-foot wooden boat, at night in a blizzard, and in the teeth of 60-foot waves, to rescue the crew of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker that had broken in two off the elbow of Cape Cod.

“The motto of the Coast Guard at that time was, ‘You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back,’ ” Fitzgerald said with a wry smile as he watched the movie come together. “It was our job.”

Doing the job that night resulted in the rescue of 32 crew members of the Pendleton in a Coast Guard boat designed to hold eight. Fitzgerald and his comrades had fought the brutal storm for five miles, without a compass or even a windshield, which had been destroyed by the waves. On the return trip, in zero visibility, they hoped they would find the beach.

“I’ve never forgotten it,” said Fitzgerald, the last surviving member of the team. “I can remember it like it was yesterday.”

Although the night is seared in Fitzgerald’s memory, not many people are familiar with the story. Even Fitzgerald’s wife, Gloria, said she had not heard of the rescue until after she married Andy in 1956.

“He doesn’t consider himself a hero to this day,” Gloria said, a small smile creasing her face. “He’d say, ‘It was three hours of work that we were supposed to do.’ ”

That humility is a big part of the story’s appeal for Watertown resident Dorothy Aufiero, who is coproducing the film, called “The Finest Hours” and based on a book of the same name.

“This was a suicide mission,” said Aufiero, who also produced “The Fighter,” an Oscar-winning film about Lowell boxer Micky Ward. “The odds of these guys coming back were slim to none. I don’t know how the story remained hidden for so long.”

The rescue earned the crew the Gold Lifesaving Medal, the Coast Guard’s highest honor. But Fitzgerald, who was raised in Whitinsville, Mass., and lives in Aurora, Colo., said he sees nothing unusual about the job he and his crewmates did.

When asked why he has not discussed the mission more, even with his wife, Fitzgerald replied without a hint of glibness or irony.

“She never asked me,” he said matter-of-factly.

Fitzgerald and his wife were flown to Massachusetts this week to watch two days of filming at the old shipyard, where the hull of the Pendleton has been re-created in a mammoth indoor pool.

Mel Gouthro, who had been sick the night of the rescue and was replaced by Fitzgerald, stood at the edge of the indoor “ocean” and gazed in silent awe at the “Pendleton” and the Coast Guard “rescue boat.”

“It’s just amazing,” said Gouthro, who lives in Wrentham.

Coproducer Jim Whitaker, who also produced “Cinderella Man,” said he was attracted to the story partly because he spent his formative years on the Nova Scotia coast.

“I love the hope,” Whitaker said. “I was immediately drawn to what people who work on the ocean do for a living, and correspondingly the people who protect them.”

“These guys were a totally different breed,” Gallner said. “I think it’s a good thing to show real-life heroes and the strength of the human spirit. It’s nice to have parts like this, where you can show regular people doing amazing things.”

After lunch during another 12-hour day on the set, Gallner posed for pictures with the Fitzgeralds. Before the photos, true to his unassuming nature, Fitzgerald told a visitor how much he admired the actors for working in cold, wet conditions on the indoor sound stage.

And then, with a shake of his head, he offered this: “We admire the actors, but they almost seem to admire us.”

* ** *** **

At long last, it’s safe to announce that the Disney corporation is actually filming The Finest Hours!

We tip-toed around the subject for a long time because nobody could say for sure if the filming would actually happen, but allowed ourselves to feel some excitement when news came out that they signed a deal with actor Chris Pine (Star Trek movie) to star as Bernie Webber (Bernie always said Don Knotts should play his part in the movie version of the story!). Now we know Casey Affleck has joined the cast, as well as Graham McTavish from Lord of the Rings.

Bernie Webber said Don Knotts would be suitable to play him in the movie

A recent article in the Cape Cod Times says Disney’s budget is $85 million! Wow. Makes you wonder what the Chatham Coast Guard station’s payroll was back in 1952 for comparison, doesn’t it? Not that it would have mattered to the 36500 crew.

a scene from the rescue

What was Chatham like in 1952?

Disney’s screenwriters keep asking me that question, in many different ways.

The process of turning The Finest Hours into a major motion picture has been very interesting to watch — and participate in, to the extent that the producers and screenwriters want my input. I’m frequently surprised at how detail-oriented they are, how they even want to glean the feelings a particular character was experiencing at different times. Sometimes I’m able to remember what was conveyed when I interviewed the surviving characters for the book, but these screenwriters have me really searching my memory for clues.

It was big news for myself and my co-author, Casey Sherman, when Disney announced early in the summer that Robert Schwentke would direct the movie (he did the recent Bruce Willis film Red as well as directing Jody Foster in Flight Plan). We knew things would get moving as soon as someone was at the helm, but we don’t have specifics of when they will film. I keep saying it was a winter storm that broke the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer apart, so maybe they’ll film this winter. (Don’t be fooled by sloppy reporters who write that the ships collided in the storm, they didn’t.)

Going over these details again and again has made me grateful that I was able to meet many of the people involved in the rescue in which 84 lives were at stake and 70 were saved, 32 of them by Bernie Webber and his small crew in the wooden 36500, the Coast Guard vessel that made it through treacherous waves at the Chatham bar. Richard Livesey was one of the crewmen with Bernie whom I was able to meet and interview in person. I felt he had been kind of forgotten, that none of his neighbors knew what he had done. Nobody had asked him about it in years.

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3 comments

I have read both Finest Hours and Bernie Webber’s account, in his book, The Lifeboatmen. I can only imagine what it took to go beyond their physical and emotional boundaries, to create that miraculous rescue and am looking forward to not only seeing it, but feeling it, via your movie. Fatal Forecast is another book that would make an epic film! I felt like I was in the lifeboat with Ernie the whole time and as if I held my breath from start to finish. You are my favorite author and you make me feel as if I have the ocean in my blood, even though I am a landlubber. Kudos to you, Mr. Tougias, as always, a grand adventure and riveting account of the best of humanity under pressure.

Wow! That’s quite a director they landed to make your book a movie! I think I’m almost as excited as you are to be sitting in the theater with a popcorn watching such an amazing story on the big screen! Myself and my wife will be seeing you soon at one of your speaking engagements to buy “A storm too soon”